[Avodah] Are We to Humiliate Sinners as Mitzvah Tochacha?

[Jay F. Shachter]

> 
> The RaMBaM seems to rule that we not humiliate sinners but only when we
> begin
> He writes Techilah
> and in Teshuvah he writes that the sinner requires to be embarrassed in
> order to repent
> 

There are enough contradictions in Rambam that we don't have to invent
contradictions that don't exist.  You yourself used two different
English words to describe the two phenomena.  When you realize that
you have sinned, you are embarrassed, you are ashamed; but that does
not imply that you are humiliated.  The realization that you have
sinned may even be brought about by something private that is knowable
only to you, like when someone speaks of hanging a picture on a wall,
and that reminds you that you once lynched three innocent men for a
cattle rustling they did not commit.  You are obliged to admonish your
fellow Jew, and that may bring him or her to an awareness of sin, and
to shame and repentance (or it may not; the commandment is for us to
admonish our fellow Jew, not to bring about his or her repentance),
but you are forbidden to admonish your fellow Jew in a way that
humiliates him, or her, in public.

(We can postpone for another time a proper discussion of people who
have humiliated themselves, and how to respond to them.  Halakha
requires us to publicly shush someone who is talking in synagog during
public prayer -- it does not merely permit it, it requires it -- and
this might puzzle you greatly, because humiliating someone in public
is a more serious sin than talking in synagog; but everyone there
already knows when someone is talking in synagog, when you shush him
you are not humiliating him any more than he has already humiliated
himself.  Similarly, we are allowed to comment on Areivim on articles
posted on Areivim by some fool who has already humiliated himself in
public by posting his article, because we are not humiliating him more
than he has already humiliated himself.  The original sin was incurred
by the Areivim moderators who posted his article, because that is like
putting a microphone on the person talking in synagog, and taking a
video recording of it, and propogating it to the world.)


               Jay F. ("Yaakov") Shachter
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               When Martin Buber was a schoolboy, it must have been
               no fun at all playing tag with him during recess.